The present invention represents header and footer structures in a markup language (ML) document. The ML document may be parsed by applications that understand ML other than the application that generated the ML document. The ML document may be manipulated on a server or anywhere even when the application creating the ML document is not present. The header or footer originally used in the ML document may be manipulated when the ML document is parsed by other applications. Header and footer information (i.e., properties) are saved in a markup language (ML) document without data loss, while allowing the header and footer structures to be parsed by ML-aware applications and to be read by ML programmers.